As was mentioned at Phoronix recently, the developers of Sauerbraten have released a new version of its Cube-based engine earlier today, and Phoronix had posted screenshots from the freshly compiled copy. Today's sauerbraten_2006_01_31_mp_edition.zip package measures in at 35.0MB (a PowerPC Mac package has also been available). This package includes the source-code as well as the Windows and Linux binaries, along with various other files. Although the Microsoft Windows binaries have been reported to work without any problems, in our testing thus far we have experienced issues with the Linux client binary from the January 31, 2006 release. Largely, we were faced by segmentation faults with the client as well as other issues. However, to assist in getting Sauerbraten running for GNU/Linux users who have had no luck with the binary sauerbraten/bin_unix/linux_client, we have whipped up a small how-to guide for compiling this most recent of Sauerbraten under Linux. As this most recent version has only been released hours ago, we haven't had time to accomplish any thorough testing nor have we seen any official CHANGELOG, however, we believe not many changes in the compilation process have occurred between this initial 2006 release and the previous build from November 2005. Many of the in-game improvements with this latest release involve multi-player items. The Sauerbraten Linux requirements are OpenGL, SDL, SDL_Mixer, SDL_Image, zlib, and libpng, along with the various development packages for compiling the game/engine.

- First off, the most recent version of Sauerbraten needs to be attained, and in our instance, and what we will refer to the package as for the duration of the article, is sauerbraten_2006_01_31_mp_edition.zip. The official mirrors for download are available at their SourceForge site, which is accessible through their Sauerbraten site. Also accessible is their CVS server (Sauerbraten CVS Web Viewer).

- After downloading, the package needs to be extracted. unzip sauerbraten_2006_01_31_mp_edition.zip

- Next, the directory needs to be changed to enet. cd sauerbraten/enet/

- The default configure file (made by GNU Autoconf v2.59) in the enet directory, is likely to contain MANY errors, or so our initial testing has revealed. Rather than debugging the errors, we simply regenerated the file. aclocal && automake -a -c --foreign && autoconf

- After regeneraring the configure file, the script can be executed and then compiled. ./configure && make

- Next, change over to the source directory and then run its default Makefile. cd .. && cd src && make

- After the previous command has ran successfully, there should be two resulting binaries -- sauer_client and sauer_server. These two binaries need to be re-located to the bin_unix directory. cd .. && cp src/sauer_client sauerbraten/bin_unix/ && cp src/sauer_server sauerbraten/bin_unix/

- The sauerbraten_unix script in the sauerbraten directory will not properly run with these newly created binaries (as the previous Linux binary was named linux_client). To fix this problem, the sauerbraten_unix script can be altered so that the bottom most line (exec ${CUBE_DIR}/bin_unix/${MACHINE_PREFIX}${SYSTEM_PREFIX}client $*) now reads exec ${CUBE_DIR}/bin_unix/sauer_client $*. Alternatively, as the script will fail if running an x86_64 AMD or Intel processor, sauerbraten_unix can be modified with its conditional statements or alternatively an entirely new file can be created that simply executes the binary from bin_unix/sauer_client. A similar process can be accomplished with its server variant.

With building these new Sauerbraten 2006_01_31 Linux binaries, and a few modifications to these various files, the game has ran flawlessly thus far today in our tests as well as using x86_64 hardware and software. Of course, our instructions today are the general basis for building this game and engine, however, the specific steps may vary depending upon your distribution of choice as well as configuration. For reference, we had successfully built this new version of Sauerbraten with Fedora Core 4. We will deliver more information on this update at a later time.